A Kidnapped West by Milan Kundera

Author:Milan Kundera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

And, to be frank, I feel that the error made by Central Europe was owing to what I call the “ideology of the Slavic world.” I say “ideology” advisedly, for it is only a piece of political mystification invented in the nineteenth century. The Czechs (in spite of the severe warnings of their most respected leaders) loved to brandish naively their “Slavic ideology” as a defense against German aggressiveness. The Russians, on the other hand, enjoyed making use of it to justify their own imperial ambitions. “The Russians like to label everything Russian as Slavic, so that later they can label everything Slavic as “Russian,” the great Czech writer Karl Havlíček declared in 1844, trying to warn his compatriots against their silly and ignorant enthusiasm for Russia. It was ignorant because the Czechs, for a thousand years, have never had any direct contact with Russia. In spite of their linguistic kinship, the Czechs and the Russians have never shared a common world: neither a common history nor a common culture. The relationship between the Poles and the Russians, though, has never been anything less than a struggle of life and death.

Joseph Conrad was always irritated by the label “Slavic soul” that people loved to slap on him and his books because of his Polish origins, and about sixty years ago he wrote that “nothing could be more alien to what is called in the literary world the ‘Slavic spirit’ than the Polish temperament with its chivalric devotion to moral constraints and its exaggerated respect for individual rights.” (How well I understand him! I, too, know of nothing more ridiculous than this cult of obscure depths, this noisy and empty sentimentality of the “Slavic soul” that is attributed to me from time to time!)*

Nevertheless, the idea of a Slavic world is a commonplace of world historiography. The division of Europe after 1945—which united this supposed Slavic world (including the poor Hungarians and Romanians, whose language is not, of course, Slavic—but why bother over trifles?)—has therefore seemed almost like a natural solution.

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